I went and bought myself a Wacom Bamboo tablet for myself for Christmas. I’ve been wanting to make animations for awhile now, but not having a scanner or a camera has made it difficult. I can’t draw with a mouse for the life of me, so I figured it was about time. I tried to explain the concept of a graphics tablet to a few people, but with everything being an ereader or a netflix projector or a flying birds thrower, it’s hard to imagine wanting a tablet that doesn’t have a screen and is really just an over sized track pad with a fake pen.

I’ve got a half baked idea for an animated sitcom that I’m going to start writing with one of my roommates that will show off our slightly recognizable Jimmy Stewart impressions.

Anyway, the Bamboo tablet came with a quick little animation program that wasn’t bad for what it was. No audio capability, and it can only export FLVs (which makes it hard to use trusty, old Windows Movie Maker), but it was easy and free is free. I’m still getting used to drawing on the tablet and whatnot, but it is already leaps and bounds over trying to draw with a mouse.

Without further ado, my first surrealist short film of 2013 that was made in less than 5 minutes.

Since I’ve started trying to digitize my comics, I’ve realized that one of the most annoying parts of the process is redoing the text after I’ve already scanned and colored everything in. Yeah, I can write out new text, scan and copy + paste it into photoshop, but even typing that out makes me just want to leave it the way it is, awkward phrasing, misspellings, and smudges oh my. It doesn’t help that when I’m writing the text for the speech bubbles, I am concentrating on making the letters legible, which leads skipping over important words/ drinking.

So, I set off to turn my handwriting into a font. There are plenty of services and software that probably do a great job, but also cost money. As a perennially unemployed person, I am looking for free. I decided to try myscriptfont.com.

The process seemed easy enough. Print off a template, write in the letters, scan, upload, and it spits out your handwritten font.

Since I’m always trying to make simple things take a long time, and since I don’t own a scanner anymore, nor a printer for that matter, I had to do tedious, repetitive photoshopping. If you upload a photo of the filled into template that was taken on your phone, the font doesn’t turn out well at all. I guess the lines have to be straight, go figure.

So, I magic wanded each letter, copy + pasting it into the template, while watching futurama on netflix because of attention span.

If you’re in the same not having a scanner- boat as me, make sure to save an unflattened copy just in case the kerning of your font doesn’t turn out right and you need to make adjustments.

I uploaded my filled in template and downloaded my handwriting font.

Behold, my handwriting that I typed out onto a computer. It’s not perfect, but it will make the comic editing process a whole lot smoother. I am now one step closer to fully automating my hand drawn comic making process.

On our drive to Seattle, we stopped in Boulder. We couldn’t get to the place we were staying because a professional bike race had closed down all of the roads that would take us there. We decided to stop for coffee.

I used to save the cardboard from nutri-grain bar boxes to paint on. I made a few two panel painted comics, but sadly gave them away without archiving them (there was a really great Winnie the Pooh one that I may have to recreate someday). I started this one in 2007 and wasn’t all that impressed, so I put it aside. I still don’t think the painting is very good, but I finished it today nonetheless. One less thing off the back burner to make room for more unfinished projects.

I had two friends that were moving to Seattle, so on whim, I decided to join them. One is starting his PHD program and teaching at the University of Washington next week, the other is in the same unemployed English graduate boat as me.

There were plenty of things I forgot to do before I left, lots of people I didn’t see, many things I forgot to pack, but it had to happen. I love Fredericksburg, but I needed a change, a kick in the butt to get things going.

I made a 2012 Summer Mix (which is available to download) and got a AAA card. Then we drove 3,000 miles, making pit stops in Louisville, KY, Manhattan, KS, Boulder, CO, and Salt Lake City, UT along the way. We unsuccessfully saw the Natural Bridge in Virginia (no way is that worth $20 per person), we saw the Cahokia Mound and St. Louis Arch while sitting in traffic, and didn’t go inside the Chautauqua in Boulder, but did walk up to it, out of breath from the altitude. I didn’t take pictures of any of these things. Luckily, I did remember to take photographs of the following:

Last thing I remember before we left what I’m used to, a West Virginian Rest stop.

Lots of pictures of Colorado and Utah that are hard to tell which state you were in.

The Salt Flats were really fitting after Curiosity Landed.

After spending three days in Salt Lake City, we pushed on to Seattle. What really brought the trip to an end was walking up to Gas Works park at night.

We finally got internet at the apartment (no thanks to Comcast), my belongings arrived via UPS (I now have more than one pair of pants) and I may finally start looking for a job. I moved to Seattle and now I have to change my timezone settings on all of the internet.